BENEATH OUR APPETITE for sizzlin’ sirloins and juicy lamb chops lies a not so palatable truth: the grain-fattening mania of industrial animal farming has been unkind to animals and destructive to the environment, and has left us too dependent on oil. More than that, most American meat doesn’t taste very good. Truly great cooking, the food that evolved out of the world’s thriving peasant cuisines, has always been regional and distinctive. It can’t be any other way.
On an early July morning a few years ago, I walked out to where the lambs were grazing and watched Padraic, the livestock assistant at Stone Barns, getting ready to move the one hundred or so lambs to a new paddock of grass. I had thoughts, if not visions, of the Marlborough Man. Padraic is six feet four inches, with chiseled features and piercing eyes, and as he tipped his cowboy hat up to the sun I waited for him to open a can of Skoal or crack a leather whip to keep the lambs moving. Instead Padraic called out in a gentle coo, opened the fiberglass fence, and gently waved the first lamb onto the new grass. “That a girl,” he said, tapping her on the rump.
Until that moment I thought I knew good lamb. I had certainly sourced enough from local farmers over the years, and I had roasted enough chops and braised enough shanks to recognize a well-raised lamb when I ate it.
What I didn’t know, and what I hadn’t stopped to consider was, What does a lamb want to eat? It’s a strange question, but out in the field watching the lambs excitedly trot to new grass, without being pushed or cajoled, it wasn’t hard to recognize that they actually cared quite a lot about what they ate. You could even call them picky. They moved quickly over certain grasses to get to others—to nosh on clover and mustard grass, avoiding horse nettle and fescue along the way. They resembled hungry, aggressive diners at a New York City buffet table.
That’s just it, lambs on a grass diet don’t so much get fed as work to feed themselves, and the distinction is not small. Their diets, and most likely their pharmacological needs, are integrated into the rhythms of the seasons, just like fruits and vegetables.
Grass-based farming, a philosophy as much as a methodology, has been called inefficient. It’s been called many other things too: expensive and elitist, and highly impractical. “You can’t feed the world that way” is the frequent rebuke, as if shepherding animals onto fresh forage was as outdated as the horse and buggy. It’s time consuming and labor-intensive, and it requires you to be attuned to the soil and grasses, among many other supposedly needless worries.
Yet what I saw as I stood there watching Padraic was not a nostalgic image of America’s agrarian past, but a vision for the future of the whole of animal husbandry. And (so long as I’m generalizing) it might also be a look at the future of food. Why? Because there’s been a dirty little secret about our sirloins (and our chicken breasts and our pork chops). It’s not just that the industries responsible for raising our meat are mired in a system that’s cruel to animals, or that their practices are destructive to the environment, or even that they have grave effects on our health: we’ve known about all of that for many years. No, what’s becoming more and more clear is that most American meat—insert your favorite cut here—doesn’t taste very good.
Take America’s Colorado lamb, famous for those perfectly uniform and fatty chops. Since fat carries flavor and retains moisture, it’s pretty easy to have a moist and juicy bite of industrially produced lamb. But as Garrison Keillor said, “You can taste the misery in every bite.” A chef might say that the misery you’re tasting is greasy fat. Greasy fat is not natural fat. Greasy fat coats your mouth. It’s sweet, soft, and nutty, and it tastes nothing like the animal you’re eating. It also surrounds a kind of watered-down version of what lamb could be, which is deceptive after unwrapping that Cadillac-size chop from the butcher. What you’ve really got is lamb-lite.
An added insult: most lamb recipes instruct you to “remove fat cap and discard.” We do this without thought, as if we’re unpacking groceries. It’s how professionals do it too. When I was training to butcher meat, part of my job included cleaning twenty racks of lamb for dinner service every afternoon, and with each rack the head butcher showed me how to pull off the two solid inches of fat covering the loin and discard it in the trash. Taking it to the dumpster, I thought about the irony. The restaurant paid the highest price for the most coveted part of the animal, only to toss 10 percent of it in the trash? When I asked the old French butcher why the chef wanted the fat removed, he looked at his young apprentice with a raised eyebrow: “It’s disgusting, so much fat.”
That excess fat comes from lamb fed a truckload of corn, which in turn came from an ocean of cornfields—cornfields made possible by fertilizers and pesticides, and $300,000 combines. Add to that the trucking and processing of corn and you can sum up the process, and define the thick coat of fat, in one word—oil.
For the last thirty years, environmentalists and small farmers (and, if I may add, chefs) have weighed in to suggest that this is several kinds of madness. In light of the dire health and environmental warnings, they made inspiring, superhuman attempts to wean our big food chain off its addiction to oil. But all along, the industrial agriculture juggernaut simply responded: If we’re feeding more people more cheaply, and using less land, how terrible could our food system be?
Therein lay the justification, the motivation—the business plan, really—of American animal agriculture.
That is, until now. Thanks to dwindling world supplies, we’re spending more for our oil today (a whopping $80 a barrel at the time of this writing versus an average price of just $20 a barrel for the last fifty years), and we’re expending more of it. In 2008, American retail food prices went up 4.5 percent; wholesale prices, 30 percent. Corn alone was over $5 a bushel, up from $3.
There are many reasons for these price jumps, including America’s wasteful ethanol subsidies and the world’s increased demand for meat. But a closer look only leads you back to oil—the demand for that corn-fattened meat is being satiated by more grain; grain is more expensive because of demands for ethanol; ethanol is expensive because of the oil it takes to extract and transport; and oil is getting more expensive because there’s less oil.
So what is there to celebrate? Quite a lot, actually. For the first time in the last half century, small and midsize farms that focus on rotational grazing—the best stewards of the land—are beginning to gain a competitive advantage. These farms aren’t as reliant on fossil fuels. They use less large machinery and fewer chemical amendments, and they have significantly lower transaction costs. Farmers like Padraic, standing in the field shepherding their herd, might look like portraits of America’s agrarian past, but in fact they’re more like savvy businessmen, removing their most expensive input (grain) and replacing it with a free energy source (grass). And these farmers, almost without exception, are producing the kind of meat we want to eat—delicious and richly textured, without flab or a greasy aftertaste, and with a flavor that changes throughout the year.
John Jamison is another of them. Jamison supplies lamb to some of the best restaurants in the country, but he still gets excited explaining the “inconsistency” of his product to chefs like me. “Oh yeah, you can taste the difference—by age, by diet. You’ll get stronger-flavored lamb in May and June based on the young wild garlic and onions, and then a leaner taste in late summer from the wildflowers. In fall you start to see the cold-season grasses, giving you the most mature and delicious fat of the year.”
When I first met John, I asked him how he got started. “My wife, Sukey, and I were a couple of hippies who didn’t want Woodstock to end,” he said. It was in the aftermath of the oil crisis. The price of gasoline had quadrupled in just a few months, from twenty-five cents a gallon to over a dollar. And the combination of falling supplies and international unrest caused grain prices to double or triple.
Along came the development of tensile wire fencing that could be set up and moved by one person (the brainchild of John Waller, not surprisingly a native of New Zealand, where grass-fed livestock is the only game going). “That was really the beginning of intensive rotation, because it could be done by one person, and you saved money on grain. For us, it just seemed economical.”
The Jamisons set up a successful grass operation on 200 acres in western Pennsylvania, but Waller’s philosophy never went mainstream. The oil crisis ended and the era of cheap fuel returned, and so did status quo methods of confined animal feedlots. For many years it was difficult for the Jamisons to compete with grain-fed operations—and lamb in this country was already a tough sell—but in 1987 their luck changed. That’s when French chef Jean-Louis Palladin, then the most respected chef in the country, called out of the blue, asking the Jamisons to deliver a few lambs for a congressional dinner at the Watergate Hotel.
“I remember we got lost on our way there, so we didn’t arrive until the night before the event. Sukey and I walked up to the kitchen, both carrying the lambs on our backs. And we just knocked on the door.”
Palladin soon came out to inspect the Jamisons’ product. He ran his hands along the carcass, and stuck his nose deep into the lamb’s cavity. “He had an enormous mane of wild hair and thick, oversized glasses, but he stuck his entire head into the carcass, breathing in, as if he was about to taste a vintage Bordeaux.”
With Palladin’s blessing, John and Sukey were soon receiving orders from chefs around the country. “It’s a funny thing,” John said. “Here we were adhering to our ideals from the sixties—living simply, improving the land, making the world a better place—and trying to farm in the great French peasant tradition. Along comes a Frenchman, feeding some of the wealthiest and most influential Americans, who helps make our product famous in America.”
Jean-Louis Palladin’s contribution to gastronomy was enormous, and well documented. But his most lasting contribution might be helping to ensure the success of the Jamisons, who have gone on to inspire livestock farmers all over the country. These farmers allow us to envision a future for raising livestock where the farming model isn’t rooted in the General Motors mindset—take more, sell more, waste more. Instead, the motivation is to keep our eyes firmly planted on the sun, our planet’s greatest source of free energy, and figure out how to better profit from what’s pouring down every day.
“The best part of meeting Jean-Louis was just after he tasted our lamb. I’ll never forget when he took the first few, frantic bites,” John said. “He suddenly got all quiet. His eyes welled with tears. Tearing off a piece of butcher paper, he quickly drew an outline of France, describing the different flavors of the lamb from each region.”
Variation, the enemy of conventional animal husbandry, is avoided through a constant diet of grain. Palladin saw it differently, and appreciated what every chef, and every serious eater, knows instinctively. Truly great cooking, the food that evolved out of the world’s thriving peasant cuisines, is regional and distinctive. Until recently, it had never been any other way.
Palladin never bought into the grain-fattening mania of animal farming, not because it was destructive to the environment, or because it left us too dependent on oil, but because it never produced anything really good to eat.
“Jean-Louis used to call me after a delivery,” Jamison told me, “and he’d tell me the exact age of the lamb that was delivered, and then he’d list for me the different grasses they were eating. It was incredible—he was telling me what they were eating.” John paused, and then added, “At those moments I felt strangely, even pleasantly, confused—it was like, who’s the chef and who’s the farmer? There just didn’t seem to be much difference.”